Josh Haner/The New York TimesĬlimate change acts here as it does elsewhere, exacerbating scores of other ills. The banks of a murky canal lapped at the trestle of a railway bridge, which, until recently, had arched high over it.ĭredging along the Karang river in North Jakarta. Not long ago I drove around northern Jakarta and saw teenagers fishing in the abandoned shell of a half-submerged factory. About 40 percent of Jakarta now lies below sea level.Ĭoastal districts, like Muara Baru, near the Blessed Bodega, have sunk as much as 14 feet in recent years. The main cause: Jakartans are digging illegal wells, drip by drip draining the underground aquifers on which the city rests - like deflating a giant cushion underneath it. In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise - so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains regularly swamp neighborhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth. The sea, once far from his doorstep, now looms over the shop. Rasdiono and his daughter at the family’s Blessed Bodega in Jakarta.
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